The Weight Is a Gift

One-hit wonders continue to establish themselves as solid if unspectacular Barsuk tunesmiths, here with production help from Chris Walla.

Adulthood, ever a fat target for the snark-based community, shares an uneasy alliance with cliché. In almost every case, the mandates of maturity occasion an acceptance of the commonplace; out are Kerouac's "fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders in the stars," replaced by duty and, eventually, mortality. No longer desperate to be unique, this kid imagines, we become merely ourselves. The remaining big truths are the universals.

On fourth album The Weight Is a Gift, Nada Surf amble into impending senescence with hope, poise, and a similarly complex relationship toward the prosaic. The New York trio's 30-something members now bear dual millstones around their necks: Not just 1996 MTV Buzz Clip "Popular", but also the spacious, Death Cab for Cutie-influenced indie-pop of 2003 Barsuk debut Let Go. While The Weight Is a Gift lacks its predecessor's bird's-eye introspection and moments of near-sublimity, it's another often-compelling set of melancholic post-Coldplay guitar-pop, made grittily optimistic by the tribulations of post-hipster existence.

It's these burdens that have set Nada Surf free. The band will never be accused of defying clichés, but it has survived on an ability to subtly add color to them. Where "Popular" was itself a bratty string of high-school stereotypes, the more modest success of Let Go served, if not to erase the truism "one-hit wonder," at least to add a middle option. Yeah, "Blonde on Blonde" absconded with a better songwriter's poetry, but singer Matthew Caws' forlorn falsetto and graceful scene-setting made the loving theft believable; "Inside of Love" was pretty much what you'd expect, done better than we had any right to expect.

The Weight Is a Gift is a sad album that acknowledges that, hey, maybe the bourgeois solecisms that flow so cheaply from others' lips really do have meaning-- and that gives it hope. Upbeat opener "Concrete Bed" tosses out itchy acoustic guitars and clunky rhymes like "ossified"/"fried" before building into a potentially laughable chorus, "To find someone you love/ You gotta be someone you love." Yet Caws' subject already knows this, he says, concluding, "You've gotta call your own bluff." Third track "Always Love" offers a similarly simple sentiment and acoustic guitars that unsurprisingly build into chunky power-pop. Here, too, however, Caws isn't just childishly mouthing something he's overheard; he's coming to terms with a voice he's ignored.

The album's Northwest sheen also exists under shadow of the humdrum-- and serves as another proving ground for the underrated production of Death Cab guitarist Chris Walla, who helps give the straightforward tunes added scope and depth. His presence is particularly felt on the slowly humming, orchestral "Your Legs Grow", which appeared in different form on the Future Soundtrack for America comp. A track that could have been maudlin instead attains a simple beauty.

Suffering is essential to The Weight Is a Gift, but mostly as a turning point in the rearview mirror of redemption. The album's essence is encapsulated on its best song, "Do It Again", which starts with funky (well, you know, for Nada Surf) bass and spiderwebs of distorted guitar. "I spend all my energy staying upright," Caws sighs, begging for another go amid the "azalea air" and finally coming to the album's title revelation as cymbals crash and background vocals swell.

Follow-ups have, to put it mildly, never been Nada Surf's forte. On The Weight Is a Gift, the band bears its cross and settles for a few quiet victories rather than a spectacular failure. Maybe I'm still young enough to hope that adulthood can be more surprising than this; "All Is a Game" never brushes aside the well-worn sentiment of its title or its adult-alternative environs, breakup song "What Is Your Secret" suffers from a lame movie metaphor, and dreamy "Comes a Time" fails to live up to its nods to Neil Young and Paris, Texas.

Time has allowed Nada Surf to uncover the truth in the trite, but it has also eroded some of the band's personality. As much as I'd like to rep for the preeminence of song and restraint over typical indie look-at-me pseudo-avant-gardism, this isn't the occasion.